NORTH POTOMAC - There was never any question Peter Yuen and Brenda Gregory Yuen would adopt a child from a country other than China. Peter's parents had emigrated from there as students. And even though he was born in California and raised an American citizen, Peter felt Chinese culture was something he could pass on.

After the Yuens married four years ago and began attending meetings sponsored by adoption agencies, they learned that the China program had one of the longest waits. But that didn't matter. They were prepared for the wait.

At least they thought they were prepared.

A year and a half ago, when they started the process, SARS was not a problem. Brenda remembers reading about a bombing at the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia and wondering how that might affect their future. She never envisioned a deadly virus would prompt quarantines, generate rumors of martial law in Beijing and put all Chinese adoptions on hold until severe acute respiratory syndrome "is under control."

The Yuens had recently moved from Boston to metropolitan Washington, after Peter got a job at the National Institutes of Health. They bought the house in Montgomery County with children in mind. Two bedrooms on the first floor. Good schools. A safe cul-de-sac. Plenty of other kids around.

It took five months to gather their paperwork. They needed Peter's birth certificate from San Francisco, Brenda's from Kansas City, a marriage license from Memphis, where they met and wed. They had to be fingerprinted, visited by social workers, examined by doctors. Montgomery County made sure they had running water. The fire department checked for extinguishers on every floor.

Waiting for all those documents seemed to take a while, but the wait was nothing, they would learn.

After they submitted the paperwork, their agency, Adoptions Together, translated the material into Chinese. Their application arrived in China and was logged in on May 10, 2002. From that day, they were told it would take 12 to 14 months to receive a referral: a picture, medical records and personality information about their child - or children - since they said they would gladly take a boy, a girl or even twins.

They did not mark the passing months on a calendar, but Brenda noted every occasion: "This is our last [Christmas, Valentine's Day, anniversary] without our child."

While they waited, they transformed the front bedroom into a nursery. Peter painted the ceiling blue, and Brenda picked out a separate color - red, yellow, green, purple - for each wall. They began to fill the closet with baby lotion, shampoo, blankets, a humidifier, a stroller. They put a baby gate at the top of the stairs and plastic plugs in the electrical outlets. Brenda joined a Yahoo group made up of families from around the world awaiting an adoption from China. She learned that ladybugs are good luck in adoption lore, so her group - all of whose paperwork was recorded in May - dubbed itself the "Maydeebugs."

When news came in January that China was processing applications faster - two months at one time - talk among the Maydeebugs grew to a frenzy. Peter even allowed himself to imagine they might get their referral earlier than they thought.

Then February became March, and the first SARS outbreaks appeared in the back pages of the newspaper. When the war with Iraq ended, SARS moved to the front page, and accusations surfaced about China covering up the extent of its cases. Anxiety spread among the Maydeebugs in the chat room.

Brenda asked Peter, who was no expert in infectious diseases but the scientist in the family, what it meant to them, and he was sorry to say he didn't know yet. The disease had too many unknowns. All they could do was read the newspaper, scan the Internet - and wait.

They waited while the Maydeebugs who planned to take siblings to China were told their children should stay out of school for two weeks when they returned.

They waited while Maydeebugs said employers asked them to do the same.

They waited while the number of cases being reported fluctuated.

The Maydeebugs said children had been matched to parents, and referrals sat on a desk in China, waiting to be signed. Peter and Brenda began to expect a picture any week, then as time passed, any day.

They decided they were going to China to get their child, no matter what. They told friends: "Would you stay home if that was your child over there waiting?"

But they wrestled with the decision's implications:

Would they both go?

If only one went, who would stay?

What if they were quarantined?

What if they contracted SARS?

On May 2, at their agency's monthly "Waiting Parent" meeting, the mysterious disease and the world's reaction to it were the topics. The agency walked its families through their options, all of which were wrenching:

Switch to another country and start over.

Decline this referral and wait for another.

Hope your referral came from Guangdong Province, the only province where the agency's facilitator was allowed to travel at the time.

"I felt like I was on a roller coaster," Brenda said. "And I hate roller coasters."

On May 15, China made the decision for them by suspending all referrals and adoption-related travel.

Now they don't know how much longer they will have to wait.

Brenda blames the news media for blowing the story out of proportion. She thinks China was backed into a corner and had no choice but to overcompensate for under-reporting earlier.

She and Peter understand everything that has happened has been out of their control, but that doesn't mean they think any less about the boy or girl or the twins who are waiting.

Brenda has stopped going into the nursery as much as she did. She has stopped turning on the light and standing there. She tries not to think about the birthdays and holidays they are missing with their child.

The scientist in Peter finds not enough patterns in the news events to even hypothesize when the ban might be lifted and their referral might come. The mother in Brenda finds the Maydeebug discussions too painful, so she limits her time on the computer.

Families they've met through the agency say an adoptive parent's wait can seem like an eternity, but you forget all about it the moment you hold that child in your arms.

That's the moment Brenda and Peter wait for - and will continue to wait for - however long it takes.